The Joe & Mac game for NES is a pretty lousy port of a pretty decent arcade game, but if you absolutely must play it, you can make sure that you have all the chances that you could possibly want, but it's going to take a little work

First, play the game long enough that you qualify for the high-score table. Beating the first stage ought to do it. Then, at the Name Entry Screen, enter your name as

DATABUNNY

Done right the name will change to

YO DUDES

Once that happens, start a new game. You'll notice that now you can fail as many times as you want without running out of lives! Which now makes this a game of endurance. Do you have enough to finish it now?

If you're playing through Dungeon Siege II and just can't find any awesome fingerwear, you do have the option of just making some.

If you hit the Enter button and type:

You get a confirmation message

And a ring with fairly good stats will drop at your feet

Of course you'll probably find something else better pretty much right away with the amount of loot that drops in this game, but hey, it's pretty good for the beginning of the game, and for free.

It's the first of the new year, and that means (among other things) that it's pretty much the middle of Winter, and that means that (around here, at any rate) that it's really cold outside. But I can get some company.

All I have to do is start up Bookworm Adventures, go to the title screen.

And type the word: Winter

Then Lex dons a scarf, produces a hot beverage, and prepares to weather the, erm, weather.

Which sounds like great advice on a day like today.

If you've never played Yoshi's Cookie, you're missing out on a... unique puzzle experience. You have to arrange the cookies into rows or columns that span the entire width or height of the puzzle so that they're easier to pack (it's easier to show than it is to explain).

And you can start at any level up to 10 to challenge your cookie-sorting abilities.

But, if you're some kind of expert cookie-sorting master or something, then you might not think that level 10 is much of a challenge.

OK, tough guy, change the Speed to High, the Music to Off, and then go to Round and hold Up while you hold Select.

The result?

You can choose any level up to 99.

Where the cookies turn into characters from the Mario universe somehow, but the game's the same.

And you need to be on top of your game, it gets pretty tough toward Level 99.

The second RC Pro-Am game is a little bit more in-depth than the first one. You still have to race radio-controlled cars around a series of tracks, but this time you get prize money to purchase upgrades for your vehicle.

And just like real life, you start out with zero dollars and have to work your way up from there...

Unless...

On the Name Entry screen if you put your initials in as "NES"

You start the game with a few extra dollars in your pocket, $5,000 to be exact

So you can immediately buy some upgrades to give yourself an early advantage.

And who doesn't love free money?

Comix Zone is tough, partially because you have one chance to get through the whole game, which means that you're going to be seeing this a lot:

So you might be tempted to go to the Jukebox

And you might be tempted to play the songs (by pressing the C button) in the following order:

3, 12, 17, 2 , 2, 10, 2, 7, 7, 11

And then you'll hear your character yell "Oh yeah!".

Start the game and you'll discover that you now have infinite health!

Which knocks out some of the challenge, true, but you can still die from falling in a pit or any of the other Instadeath(tm) methods in the game.

So it's not a total cakewalk.

The Sonic games always start out easy enough, but they ramp up in difficulty pretty quickly, and I usually peter out after about four or five Zones.

But what if you want to see the rest of the game without working for it? Easy!

First, go to the Options screen.

Then play the sounds in the Sound Test in this order: 19, 65, 09, 17.

Then hold C and press Start to go back to the title screen, and once there hold A and press Start. The result?

A menu that lets you decide where you want to start the game!

Which is very handy if you're lazy (like me).

There's really no way around it, SimCity 4 can be a tough game if you're poor at managing fake people, fake money, and fake cities. But you have these guys to help you out. They're your advisors.

Their job is to tell you how terrible of a job you're doing, and that they need you to spend more money in their pet area to make the city really awesome.

But, what would happen if you, say, held down Ctrl + Alt + Shift +X? Then you might see this box pop up in the corner of your screen.

This is a pretty fun box, it lets you put in all kinds of stuff to really mess with the game. For instance, if you put in the phrase "DollyLlama" (without quotes, natch), and then reopen your advisors tab, you'll notice that they've gotten new heads.

Yep, all your advisors are now llama-headed, which kind of takes the edge off what they have to say, you know?

If, for some reason, you want to give them back their human visages, you just repeat the code. But, I'm really not sure why you'd want to.